Monday, March 26, 2012

How to make a Packing peanut Dispenser?

If you ship orders on Etsy, Ebay, for wholesale you know what a pain it is to deal with packing peanuts. With pottery being fragile, you just have to make friends with packing peanuts. I had been struggling with removing peanuts from bags and boxes and all it created is a big mess and I had to come up with a solution.

Sure you can always buy a packing peanut dispenser but it is going to cost you big time and it might not be the size you want. Here is a simple plan that was fairly easy to do and you can do it too. I also got some great ideas from Jim Bridgeman who has an awesome dispenser which holds the peanuts on the upper floor of his studio.

The best part is that it costed me peanuts. LOL! I actually had everything at home and just needed the tarp which was $10 and the damper.

Cut out the tarp to the dimensions that work in your space. Above are the dimensions that I used and this can hold a LOT of peanuts. You do need some sewing skills. Make sure you use a needle for thick material like denim. Fold the top and sew the top so as to fit a 1 inch pvc pipe in the loop.

Pass four 3 feet pvc lengths in the loops and connect them with elbows. This helps in maintaining the top of the dispenser square and steady for loading.

I attached a 6" duct with a damper. With this you can open and close the damper for flow of peanuts.

Then with some rope and pulleys you can bring it down to fill and pull it up out of your way for packing.

Feel free to share this with your friends and Etsy teams who do a lot of shipping online.

If you have any suggestions on improvement of the design or other helpful tips on packing, feel free to comment below.

Hi SteveThinking about it further I got just the damper flap from HomeDepot and attached it to the 6" duct. Here is a link to the flap that I had purchased. http://www.homedepot.com/p/Master-Flow-6-in-Damper-D-6/100396929#Hope this helps Charan